Looking For Life
by sheffield-accents
Summary: Unbeknownst to him, Lee Scoresby left behind a daughter after his last visit to Texas. She dreams of something beyond her simple life. When she leaves Texas, an unlikely intersection of Lee's past and present occurs when she meets Lyra Belacqua. The two of them must work together to solve a mystery that will introduce Lyra to old friends and fond memories.
1. Naive Melody

I never met my father, but my mama always said he was a good man. Me, I don't know how good of a man you can be to leave a woman and child and never come back to them, but mama always said he never knew. He never knew about me. Never knew I'd come into this world because of him. He was a man of adventure and a soldier of fortune. He'd gone off with his balloon to see the world and mama had been left to raise me alone.

Mama always said my father was a good man. And she always said I was his spitting image. I knew that made her sad, but what could I do about it? It's not really my fault I got his looks. If I had my way I'd know nothing about him, but fate had a different path in mind for me.

* * *

Summers in Texas can get hotter than hell, not that anyone has ever really been to hell for a means of comparison. When you live in the heat your whole life, you learn to adapt. Foreigners that come to visit love to complain about the heat. I've never seen such a diverse group of people so unanimous on one opinion, but anyone not from Texas will tell you how they hate the heat, then marvel that it doesn't bother you one bit.

Texas was all I knew. It had been my home from the day I came out my mama's womb and I had never left it. It certainly wasn't from a lack of wanting that I never left. I had always dreamed of seeing the world, but I couldn't bear to leave my mama alone. Not when my father had done the same thing.

When mama passed shortly after my twentieth birthday, my daemon, Foley, and I thought up some big dreams of getting out of Texas, but they were only that. Just dreams. You need money and a means of travel to get out of dodge and we didn't have either. All we had was ourselves and the tiny little ranch mama left us.

The ranch had belonged to my grandpa, and he'd passed it down to my mama when he died. A lot of people didn't like us too much because mama had a baby out of wedlock. People in Texas weren't too big on all that. They were simple, religious people. Too simple for me most of the time, so I steered clear of them. Mama made me get an education, something I'll always be grateful for, and in the summers I worked as a ranch hand minding the cows and tending to the stables.

When mama died, we'd lost a lot of money and the cows had to be sold off to settle her accounts and cover her funeral costs. The ranch hands, some of whom I'd known my whole life, had to move on to other work. By the time I'd settled everything, it was just me and Foley and a worthless piece of land drying up in the Texas heat.

As much as we tried to make it work living there, we knew that one day it wouldn't be enough. And I guess we were both just waiting for that day to come.

* * *

"Hey, Chuck, you sure your daemon ain't a girl? 'Cos you're lookin' an awful lot like a feller in them britches!"

Going into town had always been a miserable experience, but it was never so bad as it was after mama died. Girls in our town were expected to wear dresses and do their hair up and be seen and not heard, but it didn't suit me well and mama had never forced me into it.

I didn't have a single dress to my name. I wore the same dirty pair of torn-up blue jeans every day of my life and I couldn't remember a time when I wasn't covered in dirt and mud from the ranch. Mama would scrub me clean every night, but I was always a mess first thing next morning.

It seemed that as used to my jeans as the boys in town were, they could never resist picking at me for it. Pick though they might, they were always leering at me anyway. They never thought of me as anything close to equal. I was just another slab of meat. We all looked the same naked to them, after all.

Foley stayed close to my side, his ears pricked up and alert. My favorite thing about Foley was his ears. They had little black tips, but the rest of him was this beautiful grey-brown color. He was a perfect match for me, but he ought to have been.

I used to lie in bed at night and stroke his fur and we'd wonder what he might turn out to be. Every kid dreams about what their daemon will be when they get older. We thought maybe he'd be a lion, or a hawk, or something big and fierce and we used to play pretend that he was. He'd change into all the things we imagined. In the end, it was less exciting, but more suited to the two of us. When I was thirteen he settled down as a jackrabbit and never changed back. I couldn't imagine a better fit.

"That scrawny little daemon of yours looks as bad as you!" Another of the several men leaning against the fence by the shops howled at me. They were all lined up chewing tobacco and looking disgusting. I would stay single for the rest of my life if those men were my only options.

"Come over here and say that to my face. You want your ass whooped, Jeremy?" I came to a halt and Foley stood in front of me with his ears pinned back against him, his rear end up in the air, ready to pounce.

Jeremy's daemon was a plain little rattlesnake and it didn't scare us one bit. Jeremy seemed to mull it over while his daemon shook her rattler, but she didn't move and neither did he.

"Get out of here, Chuck, nobody wants you 'round here anyway."

The only reason Jeremy backed down from fights with me is because I'd kicked his ass on several occasions and he was tired of having it handed to him on a plate. I was glad, because I didn't really want to waste my time on him and neither did Foley. Jeremy's daemon might not have been the toughest, but she could pack a mean wallop when you pissed them off.

"Gonna look into train tickets?" Foley asked, following me up the steps into the hardware store.

"And buy them with what?" I laughed. "My looks? Nah, I'm not going to look into train tickets."

"If we were really dedicated, we'd just stowaway like real travelers."

"I thought real travelers had balloons or boats or horses. We haven't got any of those things."

"Mama said your father's got a balloon."

"Yeah? And where is he?" I rolled my eyes and grabbed some supplies to repair the deteriorating side of the stable back on the ranch.

"I don't know what you're buying any of this for," Foley complained. His ears wiggled like they always did when he was annoyed. "What's the point in fixing a stable that hasn't got any animals living in it?"

"It might if we can get some money."

"Why don't you just sell the land and use it to get out of here?"

I sighed and stared at a pack of nails hanging on a small rack in front of me. "Mama kept the ranch going for so long, Foley. I know we want more than this, but it seems horrible to let it fall into someone else's hands."

"Mama was content here. We aren't. Because we're not like mama and Hank. They were homebodies. We're not."

"Foley, we've talked about this before. I just don't think now is the time."

"And when will be the time?" he grumbled. "When we're old and getting ready to die? If we don't go and see the world now, we'll be too crippled to do anything by the time we decide to leave this god-forsaken country. All we gotta do is get a train ticket to New York. We could get a Zeppelin across the sea. We could see the whole world."

"It's just a dream, Foley," I grabbed the nails and carried them with the rest of the supplies to the front desk.

"Doin' some repairs, Charlie?" The old man behind the counter asked as he punched the buttons on his register. His daemon, a bright little chickadee, chirped loudly and perched herself on his shoulder.

Mac had been running the hardware store since before I was born and he was one of the only people in town who was remotely nice to me. Truth be told, I think he'd been having an affair with my mama for some time when I was little. I wasn't going to be the one to judge that. Not when Mac had always been kind to me and my mama.

"The stable's falling apart on one side. Thought I might fix it up if I could."

"You need any help?"

I smiled. "I'll let you know if I do. I promise."

"You better keep that promise," he winked and handed me my items.

I paid him quickly and we hurried back out into the heat, past the men on the fence who were too busy hooting at a couple of girls walking by the bother with me, out onto the path that led out to our ranch three miles from town.

Foley was irritable after our conversation and I knew he wanted me to apologize, but I didn't feel up to it. Some days, Foley's plan seemed good. We could sell the ranch for enough money to get us a ticket out of Texas and even across the ocean if we liked. New York had always been a desirable option. It had always seemed like a wonderful city. Mama had a few letters from my father before he'd lost contact with her. He'd sent her some postcards from New York and she kept them in a drawer in her desk. I hadn't touched much of her stuff since she'd passed.

As nice as Foley's plan could seem, I knew I couldn't do it. There was something in me always stopping me from putting the ranch up for sale. I had grown up there. It was my home. How could I desert the place I loved?

The thing was, though, I never quite knew if I really loved the ranch or if I just loved my memories. To me the ranch was home, but it was also the place that had kept me stuck in Texas my whole life. Foley saw that even when I couldn't.

I think what really kept me from going was that it would have made true all the things my mama always said about me being just like my father. If we left Texas to see the world, we'd be like him. It was bad enough I looked like him and my daemon was just about the same as his. I couldn't set it in stone that I was my father's child.

Foley always said I was too harsh. Our father didn't know about us so how could he know he was needed back in Texas? To me, my existence was irrelevant in the matter. He'd loved my mama and then he'd lost all communication with her. If he'd really loved her, why hadn't he come back or at least ended things right before he went off to see the world? Why had he left us all alone?

"You're not going to repair the stable today, are you?" Foley asked.

"I was going to get started."

"It's hotter than usual. Can't we wait until tomorrow?"

"And do what today? Lie around the house in my underwear staring at the ceiling wishing we could afford indoor air?"

"Sounds better than working on the stable to me," he rubbed against my leg.

"You're a bad influence."

"You're a bad influence on yourself. I'm just an extension of you."

"You keep using that defense," I tapped his side with my boot.

Despite a lack of concrete plans for the day, I liked Foley's idea of lying around a lot better than starting any work on the stable that day. He was right: it was too hot to be doing any sort of hard labor. And when we thought it was too hot, it really was. So I stored the supplies I'd bought in the stable and then we barricaded ourselves in the tiny little house I'd grown up in.

I shut the blinds to keep the heat out, but it made me feel even more isolated from the rest of the world. Foley rubbed against my leg to make me feel better and it worked well enough. It was still too hot inside even with the blinds keeping the heat out though, so I stripped down to my skivvies and we lay on the floor and tried to keep cool.

Foley was lying on the world map we often had spread out on the floor in the living room. He was looking at the different trade routes and Zeppelin paths dreaming of a day when we could follow those roads. I didn't want to think about it because it always put my stomach in knots, so I tried to read for a while, but I'd read every book in the house a dozen times and I didn't really have the money for any new ones, so I got bored fast.

"Foley?"

"Hm?"

"Do you think mama would want us to stay here?"

Foley closed his beady little eyes and laid his ears against his back. "I think she'd want us to do what made us happy. And I think she'd expect us to leave."

"Yeah," I agreed.

"To be honest, I think she expected us to leave before she ever died. So I think she got more than she could hope for in that respect. Even if we sell the ranch, it'll be a while before the deal's closed. We wouldn't have to leave right away."

"Okay," I stretched my arms up above my head. "If we _were_ to leave. Where would you want to go after New York? I want to see London. And maybe Paris."

"London sounds fun," Foley nodded. "We could see Big Ben."

"So that's the plan," I laughed. "We'll go to New York and then London. We'll get a job in a coal-mining shaft and we'll be just as dirty as we are here. Hm?"

"I don't know about the coal mining bit," Foley yawned.

I laced my fingers in his soft fur and closed my eyes. "One day, Foley. I promise. One day we'll get out of here and see the world. We'll meet scholars and magicians. We'll sail on the sea. We'll go up into the arctic and see the place where that big hole in the sky used to be."

Foley nuzzled against my side. "Maybe we'll even meet an armored bear."

"Yeah. I'll bet you our father can't even say that."


	2. End of a Century

The "For Sale" sign went up on a cloudy day in August just after a big crowd of tourists had come in from Chicago to see what "rural life" was like. People who could afford a vacation to the place where people only lived to make a living were the type of people who might be crazy enough to drop half their savings on an old ranch in Nowhere, Texas and that's what Foley and I were banking on.

It was a sad day staking that sign into the dry earth. I had to carry a bucket of water from the well to wet the earth enough to keep the sign steady, but it still blew back and forth as the wind picked up. It wasn't going to rain, though we needed it, but the tourists still walked around town with umbrellas tucked under their arms, tutting and looking up at the sky every few seconds. There was no telling tourists anything because city folks always just assumed if you lived out in the country it was because you were dumber than dirt and didn't know your ass from your ankle. I would have put money down that none of them was smart enough to grow crops in the dead Texas soil.

Foley and I went into town to hang fliers after staking up the sign back at the ranch. There was a man from Houston that did most of the real estate business in our town and he had helped us draw up the documents for the sale. He was a nice enough man and we knew he wasn't going to try and trick us out of our money. He said we could get thirty thousand dollars for the ranch if we fixed up the stable. I didn't even know what I would do with that much money but it sounded all right to me.

"It ain't going to rain, you blind fool," An old man named Willy shouted from his permanent spot on the porch of the Grey Gosling café. His daemon, a bristly old porcupine, puffed up her spines and snorted at the passing tourists.

Tourists didn't like Willy too much, but then again, most people didn't. There was a good division between Texans of people like Willy and people with that good old southern hospitality. I didn't like to admit it, but I was probably more like Willy than not.

A fat tourist with a toad for a daemon scurried away from Willy and stopped to watch me hang another flier. He was struggling to breath and sweat was dripping down his face; it had already stained his shirt. His daemon sat on his shoulder looking like she was melting into it.

"What's that you're hanging up there?" he asked.

"You ever learned your letters at school?" I nailed the flyer into the side of a horse post a few feet from the front of the café.

"What?" he wiped the sweat from his face with an embroidered handkerchief and clutched his umbrella tightly.

"You know how to read?" I sighed.

"Of course I know how to read. I don't know what the customs are here, but up north we all learn to read from a very young age. In fact I…"

I walked off before he could go on. Northerners were always trying to tell you how smart they were. Then they'd look at you with a lot of feigned pity that you were too poor or dumb or unfortunate to live in Texas of all places.

Unfortunately, the man followed us. Foley hissed at him and jumped circles around my feet.

"Can I help you with something?" I asked him without turning around.

"You're selling a ranch for someone?"

"All that city learning and you can't figure out it's my ranch I'm selling?"

His daemon looked down at Foley, who was becoming more and more agitated by the second. She closed her slimy eyelids slowly and then opened them again. A long, thin tongue shot from her mouth and dragged across one open eye. She croaked. She was as repulsive as the man she belonged to.

"What if I'm interested in buying the ranch?" the man asked.

"Then you can make an offer. I'm asking thirty thousand but if you'd like to offer me more, be my guest."

"Why are you selling it?"

"I'm tired of living here."

He nodded as if he understood, but he didn't. "But it must be exciting sometimes, surely. Are there really cowboys out here?"

I laughed and Foley snorted. We looked at each other and shook our heads. "Yeah, there's cowboys all right. Guess you haven't got none of them up in Chicago have you? Bet you could even get some to work on your ranch if you knew the right people."

The fat man leaned forward eagerly. "Really? Real cowboys working for me? How quaint!"

The truth was that man wouldn't get any cowhand to work for him in a million years. They'd laugh at him and spit in his face. But I knew a few who would need work soon and wouldn't mind pulling in a favor for me because they'd always been sweet on my mama.

"If you want, I'll find a few for you. It'll add to the price of the ranch. Most work scouts ask one hundred dollars per hand. You think you'd be all right with that?"

The fat man seemed to mull it over. "Well…buying a ranch is a big responsibility…I've never run one before. Have you go animals already on the ranch?"

"No. You'd have to stock it with cows and horses yourself. It's been non-functional for a few years now."

He scratched his chins and his daemon croaked loudly. "Could I have some time to think about it?"

I handed him a flier. "Greg Hickston comes down from Houston every Wednesday over at the real estate office off of Cane Street. If you're interested you can hammer things out with him."

He held the flier in his sweaty palms. "Thank you, young lady."

I groaned and walked off before he could ask any more questions or tell me he'd changed his mind. I hated being called 'young lady'. I hated being treated like a kid. I had run mama's ranch single-handedly for over a year. I lived on my own and took care of myself. Most girls my age were married or close to and only looking for a man to take care of them. I didn't want to be like that. I wasn't a kid. I wasn't a lady.

"You think he'll actually make an offer?" Foley asked.

"Who knows? You can't ever tell with city folk. They're so wishy-washy. I'd bet money if we did sell it to him he'd end up trying to sell it to someone else as soon as he realized what a chore running a ranch is."

Foley chuckled. "You're probably right. A man like that running a ranch is a scary thought."

"I think Mr. Hickston will weed out the people who aren't really that serious. All that matters to me is that we sell the place and hightail it out of here."

After all the fliers had been hung up around town, I bought myself a soda at the general store and Foley and I sat on the steps outside watching the tourists mill about with the townspeople. Most of the local folk took advantage of the tourists' stupidity. I guess I couldn't blame them.

"You know, I can't believe we're really doing this," Foley's ears were standing straight up and they twitched at the slightest change in the wind.

"Me either," I sipped at my soda. I didn't often afford myself the luxury of a soda, but it was refreshing and the taste brought back nice memories. "Just as soon as we get the money from the sale we can buy a ticket to New York. We'll have to get a ride into Houston to get the zeppelin. I wonder what it's like in a zeppelin."

"I'll bet it's fun," Foley said. "Flying up high like a bird. Probably not as fun as riding in a balloon."

"We're gonna see the whole world, Foley. Every last inch of it. I promise."

"I think mama would be proud of us," he rubbed his head up under my hand. "We're doing what we always wanted to. She knew we'd have to leave one day. At least she's at peace and we won't be leaving behind any loose ends."

I watched the tourists milling back and forth and wondered why they'd want to come here of all the places they might see in the world. It was strange and almost hurtful they way they found our rural life so exotic. There wasn't anything exotic about rough living. People died young in the Texas heat with no doctors or vaccines around to help them. Young men were made old by the harsh sun. It wasn't a place people lived in because they liked to. We lived here by necessity. We lived where we could make a living so long as we could make one.

That's why it was time for Foley and me to leave. We weren't making a living here any more. We weren't doing much of anything but wasting away with our dreams. I understood why the other folks took advantage of the tourists. The tourists had the money and the means to be taken advantage of and the townsfolk had dreams that needed tending to.

It was easy to forget that other people had dreams and hopes too. Maybe old Willy had wanted to see the world one day, but he'd never had the means and that was why he was so angry and bitter all the time. I hated thinking about how hostile I could be, how like Willy I often was. I didn't want to be that kind of person.

"If the ranch doesn't sell in six months," I stroked Foley's fur, "We're getting out of here one way or another. I can't stay here the rest of our life."

"We'll sell it," Foley said surely. "And then we can see the world."

A/N: I'm really sorry for the huge lag in updates followed by a relatively short chapter. I've started a full time job and by the time I get home I don't feel like writing usually so most of my writing time is only on the weekends. I do have plans for this story and I'm going to continue writing it so please bear with me through slow updating! Thanks for the reviews.


	3. To Here Knows When

The fat man with the toad daemon never did make an offer on the ranch, but it didn't matter to us. We waited patiently until the offers came in, and to our surprise, they did come in. By the time all was said and done we had four serious offers on our plate. I had thought nobody would want an empty ranch still in need of some serious repair even after the work done on the stable. I was expecting we would have to find a different way to get ourselves out of Texas, but for the first time in a long time, luck was on our side.

Two of the offers had come from wealthy tourists interested in "investing" in some Texan land. The other two offers were from native Texans. One was from a man who had been a ranch hand when he was younger and was looking to run one of his own in his old age, the other was from a man who already ran three successful ranches and was looking to build up a fourth one.

Foley said we ought to just pick the highest offer, but I thought we ought to consider all angles of the matter. The old man who used to be a ranch hand was offering the second highest bid at twenty-nine thousand, but I liked the idea of the ranch going to him more than the wealthy ranch owner. I wasn't even considering the two tourists. Their bids were lower anyway and they would just run the ranch further into the ground than it already was.

Twenty-nine thousand dollars was nothing to laugh at and only a thousand short of what we were asking and what the wealthy ranch owner was offering. Tickets to New York from Houston were a hundred dollars, which had always seemed like so much, but it wasn't anything out of a twenty-nine thousand dollar savings. I knew tickets across the sea would be more, but it would still be a paltry sum in comparison to the wealth we would have. It was strange to think there were people who thought twenty-nine thousand dollars was a little bit of nothing.

We took the old man's offer and signed over the papers to him in November. He was so happy that he cried and hugged me until I thought I might pass out. His daemon was a little coyote that was as tiny and frail as he was and it licked Foley right across the face. I knew then I'd made the right choice.

After that we had another month until we had to be out, which meant we'd be in New York by Christmas. I'd always heard New York was beautiful at Christmas time. They said there was a giant tree they lit up in the middle of a square with a big ice rink and all. I'd never seen snow. I was looking forward to that.

Foley and I set to clearing out all the things from the house on the ranch. Most of our belongings had been mama's and only served sentimental value now. We bought a small storage unit in town to keep a few things in and sold most of the rest. Mama's room was the last one we went through.

After mama had died, I'd never wanted to throw her things away so I'd just left her room as it was and shut the door. Walking into it hit me with a wave of emotion. It still smelled like her, the faint smell of hay mingling with her flowery lilac perfume. It was the smell of love and comfort to me and it hung all in the air in that room. Foley rubbed against my leg and I wiped the tears from my eyes before I could start to cry properly.

We put mama's clothes into sacks to donate to the local charity store, marked her furniture with prices to sell it later, then we slowly went through the drawers in her desk to see what ought to be kept and what could be thrown away.

The first drawer was a lot of receipts and transaction records for the ranch when it had still been operating. Mama had always been so good with math and accounting. She could have been a professor at a woman's school or something like that if she'd ever gotten a proper education. She'd always managed our finances and made sure I knew how to do the same when she was gone. She hadn't left me unprepared.

The second drawer contained a photo album as well as some postcards and loose notes. I set the album on the table and flipped it open. I'd never seen it before and it looked ready to shattered, the paper was so brittle.

There were lots of pictures of mama from when she was young. They started when she was probably only twelve because he daemon, Hank, hadn't settled into his final form of a roadrunner. It was strange seeing him as something else.

Foley sat on my lap and peered at the pictures. "They're so young," he said.

"I've never seen such old pictures of her," I wiped my face again and Foley nuzzled my hand to comfort me.

The pictures followed as she grew older and then I stopped dead when I turned the page. I'd never actually seen a photograph of my father before. Mama had never shown me and as I got older I didn't want to see whenever she offered. I guess that book had been what she would have showed me. Despite the fact that I'd never seen him, however, I knew without a doubt that the gangly man with the moustache and the aviator goggles standing next to my mother in the picture was my father.

They were both quite young, probably in their twenties. They were older than me, but that didn't mean much. They looked so happy it could have killed me. My father's daemon was a hare named Hester. Mama had told me that much. In the picture, she was tucked up against Hank's breast feathers and my father had his arm around mama.

They were in love.

I shut the book abruptly and tried not to cry. If he had loved her so much then why hadn't he ever come back? Why had he left us here? It didn't seem right. How could he just leave the woman he loved? Why hadn't mama tried to tell him about me? Maybe if he had known…maybe if she had told him then he would have come home and maybe I'd still have one of my parents.

Foley gently nudged my hand. "Come on, Charlie. Finish looking."

I sniffled and opened the book back up to the page I'd closed it on. There were more pictures of mama with my father. They looked too happy in every one of them. There was even a picture of them in front of my father's balloon, an impressive thing with a carriage that could fit twenty men easily.

The book ended with a picture of my mama, her belly swollen from pregnancy, standing outside of our house. I pulled the picture from the page and examined the back where mama's chickenscratch read: "For Lee, 8 months and 1 week. Missing you always" and then she had drawn a heart with her name in it.

But she had never sent it to him. And he never knew.

"If he knew, he would have come back for us," Foley said. "Mama wouldn't love a coward."

"You're right," I gently placed the picture back in the book and closed it again. "Maybe we'll find him and we can tell him who we are and about mama and we could be a family…maybe," I didn't believe the words even as they left my mouth. Even if we could find him, which seemed improbable, why would he care? It had been more than twenty years since he'd seen mama or written her. He must not have cared if he stopped writing.

I shuffled through the postcards next. They were from all over the place: New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong. It seemed our father had been everywhere in his balloon and he had sent love letters to mama from everywhere he went. But the letters stopped right around the same time mama must have figured out she was pregnant with me.

The last postcard was from a place called Trollesund. I read it slowly.

"Georgia, I've got to say I don't understand your last letter and I'm hoping it's just you missing me that's saying those things. I like seeing the world just fine, but I still want to come back to you one day and I will. Don't know when, but I will. Do you really want to end things? I can't imagine a worse fate than that. I'm missing you something fierce and I hope you've changed your mind since you last wrote. Waiting patiently to hear from you, my love. –Lee"

I read it over three more times before it finally made sense and then I was so angry that I tore the postcard to shreds and screamed at the top of my lungs. I kicked over a nightstand and broke a lamp in the process and Foley just hurried to stay out of my way.

It was suddenly clear what had happened. Mama had told my father they were finished. She didn't want to write him any more. She had ended things with the man she loved through a letter without ever telling him about me. Why she had done it was beyond me. Maybe she was afraid of how she would react or maybe she thought she'd do better raising me alone, but whatever her reason, I couldn't possibly stand behind it. All this time she had kept him from us on purpose. Let me go on slowly hating him before she would ever tell me it was her own fault he didn't know about me.

I cried for a long time after that until I thought I might be sick and Foley tried to calm me down. It wasn't until an hour later that I finally dried my eyes and took a look at the stack of loose papers that had been lying under the postcards. I didn't really want to read them after the last postcard, but I figured I better sort everything out then and get out all my emotions out at once so I could move on with things.

The top paper was a telegram.

"To: Georgia Landsby. From: The Law Offices of John Henry, Houston, TX. We regret to inform you that your friend/acquaintance LEE SCORESBY has passed away STOP the deceased has left behind a last will and testament last updated five years ago STOP this will and testament leaves the remainder of LEE SCORESBY'S personal possessions in your custody to do with as you please STOP more details can be obtained by a direct visit to our offices STOP"

My hands were gripping the paper so tight my knuckles had gone white and the edges had crumpled. All these things my mama had hidden from me all these years. The telegram was dated three years earlier, which meant mama had known my father was dead for two years before she died and never told me a word about it.

At first I was angry but then I wondered if she thought I wouldn't care. I had to admit to myself that I wouldn't have before tonight. Before the pictures and the postcards, I had grown to resent and hate the father I never knew. Now I was seeing things differently, but it was too much energy to be angry or hateful towards mama, even if I couldn't understand why she'd keep this from me. I loved mama too much to curse her name. But it hurt to know the father I had just moments ago begun to come to terms with had been dead for at least three years.

Below the telegram was a copy of my father's last will and testament. He hadn't had much to his name when he died. An old pistol, a hundred British pounds, and his balloon. The will detailed that the balloon was to be returned to mama back in Texas, but it hadn't ever made it according to the next document. My father's funds were supposed to cover the transport of the balloon, but there had only been enough money to get it as far as New York where it sat in a warehouse with other unused vessels.

My mama had left everything she had to me, so by rights my father's balloon was mine now too. Everything seemed like fate in that moment: selling the ranch, finding all these things about my father, the balloon being in the same place I was headed to. There was nothing about where my father had died or anything like that, but if he was carrying British money then that seemed like a good place to start.

"We'll see the world," I told Foley, pocketing the copy of my father's will as well as the picture of him with mama. "Just like our father did. We'll see the world and we'll find out more about him. Do you think he would have liked us?"

Foley hopped off my lap onto the floor. "I think he would have been damned proud of us!" he puffed his chest out and I realized how much he looked like my father's daemon and how uncanny our entire resemblance to him was. "And you know something else?"

"What?"

"I think he would have been proud to call you his daughter."

A/N: Thanks for your patience. I'm dealing with work + grad school apps at the moment so once apps are done I should have some more time to write. Reviews are appreciated.


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